[Web4lib] The Wikipedia Gotcha

[jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu]

Roy notes correctly that one benefit of a traditional journal is that there
is a well known editor who takes responsibility for the quality of a
journal.  Those individual editors are critically important to their fields.

What I think we can easily underestimate, though, is the degree to which
there are other vetting processes that work behind the scenes.  In most
disciplines, the actual decision on whether an article should be published
and what revisions are required is mostly based on the written opinions of
anonymous reviewers (chosen by the editor, to be sure, but their opinions
are not made public).  If you've ever published in a controversial area, you
know that there's a lot of politics that goes on.  And certainly those
anonymous reviewers, by the nature of the beast, are even less publicly
accountable than Roy's wikipedia contributors.  

Perhaps the greatest strength of the traditional journal system when it
worked correctly was that an author was guaranteed that at least a couple of
colleagues (the reviewers) would actually read the draft paper carefully!
But the tradeoff is coarse granularity of review and lack of transparency in
the process.  A postmodernist would typically see the traditional system as
being very much the captive of the existing power structure in each
discipline.

I think it will be several decades before we know whether the more open
wikipedia-like or arXiv-like processes produce better scholarship than the
old way did, or what the new rules governing the debate will be.  But the
times, they are indeed changing.

JQ Johnson, Director                 Office: 115F Knight Library 
Center for Educational Technologies  mailto:jqj at uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon            phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
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